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S

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The Untold Story of Shakespeare’s Sonnets

C L I N TO N H EY L I N

Da Capo Press

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.

Designed by Timm Bryson

Set in 11 point Arno Pro by the Perseus Books Group

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Heylin, Clinton.

So long as men can breathe : the untold story of Shakespeare’s Sonnets / Clinton Heylin. — 1st Da Capo Press ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-306-81805-9 (alk. paper)

1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Sonnets. 2. Sonnets, English— History and criticism. 3. Poetry—Publishing—Great Britain—History. 4. Literature publishing—Great Britain—History. I. Title.

PR2848.H49 2009 821'.3—dc22

2009008999

First Da Capo Press edition 2009 ISBN 978-0-306-81805-9 Published by Da Capo Press

A Member of the Perseus Books Group www.dacapopress.com

Da Capo Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, or e-mail special.markets@perseusbooks.com.

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EVERY BOOK ON THE. SONNETS. MR. S.S. ALL .HAPPINESSE.

AND .THAT. CAFÉ LATTE. PROMISED.

BY.

THIS. EVERLIVING. SCRIBE. WISHETH.

THE . WELLWORN. CHRONICLER . NOW. RUFFLING.

FEATHERS.

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Abbreviations ix Author’s Note xi

SECTION ONE (1590–1640)

“The Darling Buds of May”

c h a p t e r o n e

1609: “The Onlie Begetter” 3

c h a p t e r t w o

1590–1603: “The Sweete Wittie Soule of Ovid” 23

c h a p t e r t h r e e

1593–1603: “My Love Shall . . . Ever Live Young” 45

c h a p t e r f o u r

1609–1639: “Nothing in My Conscience . . . Did Need a Cypher” 71

c h a p t e r f i v e

1639–1640: “Scorn Not the Sonnet” 99

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SECTION TWO (1709–2009)

“This Key . . . Unlocked His Heart”

c h a p t e r s i x

1709–1821: “I, Once Gone, to All the World Must Die” 123

c h a p t e r s e v e n

1821–1973: “Castles of Conjecture” 143

c h a p t e r e i g h t

1841–2007: “The Division and Summing of the Chapters” 169

c h a p t e r n i n e

2007–2008: “Too Worthie for a Counterfeit?” 189

c h a p t e r t e n

2009: The Little Red Notebook 207

A Select Bibliography 227 Notes 233 Shake-speares Sonnets 237

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The following abbreviations appear in the main text, enclosed in brackets, to identify specific sources. A full list of sources appears in the Bibliography at the end of the book.

AM Arthur F. Marotti, “Shakespeare’s Sonnets as Literary Property,” in Soliciting Interpretation,ed. E. D. Harvey and K. E. Maus (Chicago University Press, 1990).

BDC Ben Crystal and David Crystal, The Shakespeare Miscellany (Overlook Press, 2005).

BV Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, A Lover’s Complaint & John Davies of Hereford(Cambridge University Press, 2007).

CAB Charles Armitage Brown, Shakespeare’s Autobiographical Poems(James Bohn, 1838).

EKC E. K. Chambers, Shakespearean Gleanings(Oxford University Press, 1943).

GT Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare(Hogarth Press, 1990).

HCB H. C. Beeching, Shakespeare’s Sonnets(Athenaeum Press, 1904).

HL Harold Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in 17th Century England(University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).

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HR Hyder Edward Rollins, The Sonnets: A New Variorum Edition, 2 vols. (Lippincott, 1944).

HRW H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford University Press, 1996).

JWB J. W. Bennett, “The Alleged Piracy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and of Some of Jonson’s Works,” Studies in Bibliography (1973).

KDJ Katherine Duncan-Jones, “Was the 1609 Shake-Speares SonnetsReally Unauthorized?” Review of English Studies34, no. 134 (1983).

KW Katharine M. Wilson, Shakespeare’s Sugared Sonnets (Allen and Unwin, 1974).

MSS Martin Seymour-Smith, “Shakespeare’s Sonnets 1–42: A Psychological Reading,” in New Essays on Shakespeare’s Sonnets,ed. Hilton Landry (AMS Publishing, 1976).

Q Quarto; refers to Shakes-speares Sonnets (London, 1609).

SB Samuel Butler, Shakespeare’s Sonnets(London, 1898).

SL Sidney Lee, A Life of William Shakespeare(John Murray, 1916).

SL-F Sidney Lee, Shake-speares Sonnets[Facsimile edition of Q] (London, 1905).

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xi

THAT IS THE QUESTION . . .

This is the story of a “bookleg.”

The most famous “bookleg” of them all: Shake-speares Sonnets. What, you may well ask, is a “bookleg”?

Well, it is a book that is also a bootleg, an unauthorized collection of previously unavailable material that has been published, usually surrep-titiously, without the author’s permission.

In the case of the Sonnets,the centuries-old presumption, that it was another example of the “divers stolen and surreptitious copies” that plagued Shakespeare’s professional life, has recently been under assault. In the past twenty-five years, academic opinion has shifted toward viewing the 1609 text as, in some way, approved. But, as I aim to show, once a bookleg, always a bookleg . . .

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THE

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1609

“THE ONLIE

BEGETTER”

The greatest advantage of Shakespearean studies seems to be that questions may be asked over and over again, and that almost nobody pays attention to the answers—unless he borrows them for his own use in an article or a book.

—HYDERE. ROLLINS, 1944

M

ay 20, 2009, represents the 400th anniversary of the “publi-cation” of one of the most famous books in the world. It was on that day that Thomas Thorpe, a publisher and “procurer of manuscripts,” registered “a booke called Shakespeares son-nettes” with the Stationers’ Company, a requirement for all publications under a Marian statute. The book, a thin quarto volume, contained a thirty-word dedication by Thorpe, alias “T.T.”—not Shakespeare—154 sonnets, and a long poem, “A Lover’s Complaint,” that has never been de-finitively assigned to the Bard.

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In the intervening four centuries, there have been enough volumes on the subject of the sonnets—and editions thereof—to fill a small public library. At least two entire books exist for the sole purpose of supplying bibliographies of editions of the sonnets. At the same time, the poems have become inextricably linked to a perceived biographical element for which there is still no independent evidence. As such, one would have to say that Shakespeare’s several boasts in the sonnets—of which “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see / So long lives this” (18.13–14) is the most brazen—have been fully vindicated.

So how did it come to pass that the most (in)famous English love-poems of all time—written by the most revered writer the English world has known—remained a secret subtext to the man’s plays for al-most 200 years? And what were the circumstances that originally brought it notoriety, then obscurity, and finally the recognition that ful-filled Shakespeare’s own prophecy that they would endure “so long as men can breathe”?

Despite recent assaults on a centuries-old perception, the suspicion remains that we are wholly beholden to Thomas Thorpe for their publi-cation and enduring existence; and that Shakespeare himself, for all his protestations concerning posterity, had long ago washed his hands of these microcosmic masterpieces by the time they appeared in print in the twilight of his career.

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In Bob Dylan’s case (fie! compare ye not), his song-poems were recorded in some friends’ basement in the summer of 1967, then cut on acetates and circulated, first as publishing demos, and then, for many years, on bootleg records (which almost single-handedly created the modern bootleg industry). They are the fabled Basement Tapes, Dy-lan’s most quixotic work. Shakespeare’s sonnets, on the other hand, were circulated in manuscript form for a decade or more, and when they finally did appear in print it was as a “bookleg” quarto, courtesy of Thorpe.

I do not think that in either case the author set out with any greater intention than “killing time”; the inevitable expansion of poetic range being a fortuitous by-product. The intent was to produce a collection that was private, in every sense of the word. But, somehow, both sonnets and songs slipped out.

There was nothing at all unusual about this process in bygone days. Manuscripts were the bootleg tapes of their day; and there was a small but thriving business in manuscript-copies. They were used both by the acting companies, which needed “scribal copies” in order to put on their plays, and by those who preferred to keep their latest work out of the hands of the Stationers’ Company, at least for a time. The scriveners of Shakespeare’s day were not unlike the small pressing-plants that fueled the bootleg vinyl industry in the 1970s and 1980s, while also keeping of-ficial record companies supplied: They had an incestuous relationship with the printers and were prone to indiscretion. In such a climate, “an enterprising publisher had many opportunities of becoming the owner of a popular book without the author’s sanction or knowledge” [SL].

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protection in cyberspace. The Internet has transformed the nature of all businesses, but none quite as directly as those who trade in the creative media. In such an environment, pity the man trying to discreetly circu-late a set of love poems among his bookish friends. Especially if his should be a name that, when “Googled,” generates more than 8 million “hits.”

Modern doom-mongers would like everyone to believe that copy-right constitutes some inalienable copy-right, not a manmade invention. They’d prefer us to overlook the fact that it was unquestionably created to protect the rights of publishers, not authors. The latter’s rights still generally remain subsidiary to the former. Even in the wake of a pro-longed writers’ strike over “digital rights” in Hollywood, the writer of a TV or film screenplay in the land of the free does not own the primary copyright on his work—or the absolute moral right to be designated its creator. In fact, the studio can have your work rewritten by a.n.other without your input or approval.

So, really not so different from Shakespeare’s time. Back then, the popular playwright—yesterday’s screenwriter—was a man for hire, working for actors’ guilds, for whom he produced new plays for a fee. Af-ter he did his job, all rights passed to the company, which jealously guarded these rights, along with the script itself, copies of which re-mained few and far between. So paranoid were these companies that even the actors would never see the whole play on the page. Instead, their parts “would be written out on a long roll of parchment wrapped round a piece of wood . . . with around three cue words preceding each speech, so he would know when to enter or speak” [BDC]. These scrolls were known as “cue scripts.”

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honor among the Stationers’ own brand of thief. Publishers would hap-pily breach each other’s rights, republishing books and ballads with new titles whenever the opportunity arose.

And whatever the case when he wrote this private set of lyrics, by 1609 William Shakespeare was undoubtedly the most successful play-wright in London. Smart enough to have a financial stake in his own company of players (with a royal warrant), thus controlling the very means of production and any revenue generated, he now knew that pub-lishing was a mug’s game. It had been a useful way to get his name known back in the early 1590s, when his long poems, Venus & Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece,had brought him patronage and fame. But the fortune those poems made was reserved for someone else—the pub-lisher—a fact of literary life that Elizabethan poet Thomas Churchyard bemoaned the year Venusappeared, referring to an “infinite number of other Songes and Sonets, given where they cannot be recovered, nor purchase any favour when they are craved”—i.e., published.

Shakespeare no longer craved such recognition. He had long ago de-cided that he would stake his future—and his commercial concerns— not on his poetry, but on his plays. A steady flow of piratical versions of his plays had been appearing in cheap quarto editions since 1594—i.e., directly after these two poems made publishers aware of his literary worth—proving to be a constant thorn in Shakespeare’s side (hence, John Heminge and Henry Condell’s sideswipe at “stolen and surrepti-tious copies” in the preface to their “authorized” folio of the plays). Yet he could do very little to stop the steady dissemination of the more pop-ular plays in print. By 1609 he had already seen at least fifteen of them appear in unauthorized quarto editions—with several of the poorer edi-tions not even deigning to name him on the title page.

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highly debatable whether he had any hand in the former, and pretty cer-tain he had no hand in the latter.) No one, though, would have made a mistake like that in 1609. William had the stamp of royal approval, and his name—however one spelled it—was a selling point for any quarto, be it a play or a series of poems.

Even when the Stratford squire had created a tight company of play-ers, and given them a financial interest in the success of the King’s Men, the quarto booklegs just kept coming. As recently as January 28, 1609, a quarto edition of Troilus & Cressidahad been registered by the publish-ers Richard Bonian and Henry Whalley—a full six years after another publisher, James Roberts, had registered his own right to publish The book of Troilus and Cressida, as it is acted by my Lord Chamberlain’s men. The 1609 edition was printed by the same printer as Shake-speares Son-nets,George Eld; and, unlike the Sonnets,was popular enough to warrant a second edition inside a year. As for Roberts’s edition, it would appear he had been bought off, or otherwise persuaded by the King’s Men not to proceed.

It was in this anarchic climate that Thomas Thorpe, a little known publisher with just thirteen books to his name after almost fifteen years at the trade, registered this “booke called Shakespeares sonnettes” in the spring of that very year. The book, which probably appeared a matter of weeks after registration, was the only volume Thorpe published in 1609. Presumably, he hoped it would establish his name and relieve him of some of the financial hardships he had endured to date.

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And yet, not only is the 1609 edition of Shake-speares Sonnetsone of the world’s most famous volumes, it is also one of the most valuable. Just thirteen copies have survived the centuries (as opposed to almost 300 copies of the 1623 “First Folio”), which has led to the suggestion that the book itself was suppressed, either as a result of its contentious contents, or because it was issued against the wishes of all concerned— i.e., author and dedicatee, the enigmatic “Mr W.H. ”(who may well have had the political clout to do something about it). One thing it certainly was not, was a publishing phenomenon.

In some ways, the book might as well have stayed in manuscript. There are as many seventeenth-century manuscript copies of the sec-ond sonnet in Thorpe’s collection (now thought to have circulated independently in this form) as there are surviving copies of the 1609 edition, known almost universally as “Q” (a moniker it shares, ironi-cally, with the fabled—and long lost—Aramaic source of the first-century Synoptic gospels). Something, it would appear, went badly wrong. Yet, if the failure of Shake-speares Sonnetssignaled the begin-ning of the end for Thorpe’s personal ambitions as a serious publisher of literary works, it was just the start of the sonnets’ own journey through the centuries.

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procurer of ‘dispersed transcripts’ for a longer period than any other known member of the Stationers’ Company.”

Apprenticed in 1583 at the age of fourteen, to a reputable stationer, Richard Watkins, Thorpe was finally granted the “freedom” of the Sta-tioners’ Company in 1594, which allowed him the legal right to publish and be damned. Yet it was a full six years—part of which he spent in Spain—before he was in a position to publish his first title, whether be-cause of the “lack of capital or of family connections among those al-ready in the trade” that Lee speculates hindered him, or because he had ideas above his station when it came to the type of book on which he wished to put his name.

The first book Thorpe did publish, at the turn of the century, set its own pattern of sorts. Featuring Christopher Marlowe’s translation of the first book of Lucan’s Pharsalia,it was a title replete with real literary credentials, if hardly containing the “wow” factor, commercially speak-ing. He had seemingly acquired the manuscript from fellow-stationer Edward Blount, to whom he dedicated the volume. But without his own printing press, he was obliged to have the book printed by another sta-tioner—another practice that was always eating into a hard-up pub-lisher’s profits.

Between those upfront costs he paid the printer and the cut taken by the bookseller, it is highly unlikely Thorpe made any money out of this “niche book.” He probably just hoped it would establish his credentials as a publisher of literary remains. That he had become infected with a dose of pretentiousness is evident from his long-winded dedication, full of self-serving allusions to someone struggling to make his way in the world of publishing:

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book translated, which (in regard of your old right in it) I have raised in the circle of your Patronage. But stay now, Edward, (if I mistake you not) you are to accomodate yourself with some few instructions touching the property of a Patron that you are not yet possessed of, and to study them for your better grace as our Gallants fashion. . . . One special virtue in our Patrons of these days I have promised myself you shall fit excellently, which is to give nothing. . . . Farewell, I affect not the world should measure my thoughts to thee by a scale of this Nature: Leave to think good of me when I fall from thee.

Thine in all rites of perfect friendship, THOM. THORPE.

In such a way did Thorpe establish his credentials as a man with an ostentatious love of the literary, but too little appreciation for language itself. This effusive dedication also demonstrates a man finding it hard to attract patronage, and reliant on the good graces of his fellow sta-tioner, Blount, who seems to have been something of a “procurer of manuscripts” himself. In the preface to a later volume of his own, Blount informed readers of how he learned about some interesting papers, and, “curious to see and reade them over[,] . . . supposed if I could get the copie, they would be welcome abroad,” though “the author of this booke I knowe not.” Such was the lot of the Jacobethan stationer, ever on the prowl for material he could purloin.

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first decade of the seventeenth century, with Thorpe invariably turning to Blount whenever he needed a literary leg up.

As it appears he often did. It was Blount who gave Thorpe the oppor-tunity to publish Ben Jonson five years later, relinquishing his original copyright in Jonson’s Sejanus,and assigning the rights to Thorpe in Au-gust 1605, surely another rite of this “perfect friendship.” And far from claiming ownership of everything Marlowe left unpublished, Blount gave Thorpe an interest in Hero and Leander.(Thorpe subsequently sold his share of said copyright to another publisher, Samuel Vicars, when his own publishing career came to an end.)1

Before that, in late May 1603, Thorpe and Blount embarked on a sec-ond venture together. Unfortunately, this entry into the Stationers’ Reg-ister coincided with them running foul not only of the rules, but of the unwritten code, of the company, by registering “a panegyric or congrat-ulation” to James I that had already been registered to another pub-lisher, Gregory Seton. They were duly obliged to cancel the registration. As Colin Burrow recently observed, Thorpe thus violated “one of the key principles of the Stationers’ company,” a respect for other printers’ copyrights, and probably alienated a couple of his fellow stationers into the bargain.

Nor was this Thorpe’s only breach of Stationers’ etiquette that sum-mer. Another fortuitous association with a fellow stationer, William Asp-ley—which seems to have been largely responsible for the improvement in Thorpe’s publishing prospects in the years preceding the publication of Shake-speares Sonnets—commenced in June 1603 with a joint attempt to license for publication another Stationer’s copyright. Their claim to “A letter written to yegovernors . . . of ye East Indian Merchants” was duly

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After this rocky start, things steadily improved, and through the re-mainder of that difficult decade Thorpe began to make some headway in his chosen vocation. Producing between one and three books a year, he would be responsible for a surprisingly high number of enduring lit-erary works: translations by John Healey and plays by Ben Jonson and George Chapman, as well as the poems of Shakespeare he bequeathed to posterity.

Thorpe’s joint registration (with Aspley again) of John Marston’s The Malcontent,assigned to the pair in July 1604, suggests he had now begun to develop some literary connections of his own. It was perhaps an inter-est in literature that he shared with Aspley, who had already—in part-nership with Andrew Wise—acquired copyrights to both Henry IV Part Twoand Much Ado about Nothing.Aspley, like Thorpe, never owned his own press, but unlike Thorpe, he had his own means of distribution—a shop in St. Paul’s.

Meanwhile, Thorpe continued to call in favors from his former fel-low-apprentice Blount. In 1605, he had managed to persuade Blount to let him publish Ben Jonson’s Sejanus,transferring the copyright as part of whatever bargain was struck. Perhaps Blount was concerned that Jonson might prove to be the kind of demanding publishing-bedfellow who made it hard to make an honest shilling. And it must be said that the 1605 quarto of Sejanusmade quite a contrast to contemporary “bad” Shakespeare quartos, “with its severe columns of verse flanked by marginal scholia and with the proclamations set in the style of a Roman lapidary inscription with medial stops between each word” [HL]. Jon-son, who evidently oversaw its publication, was pleased enough with the outcome to let Thorpe publish his next offering, an altogether chancier venture.

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But then, Thorpe took risks. He had already chanced his arm back in 1604, publishing an eighteen-page pamphlet by the former Jesuit and Catholic priest, Thomas Wright, on “the nature of Clymactericall yeeres, occasioned by the death of Queen Elizabeth,” a book as con-tentious as anything he ever published, and one which highlighted his Catholic connections. Perhaps it was this reckless nature which ulti-mately resulted in Shakespeare’s sonnets being thrust into his sweaty palms.

While Eastward Hoappears to have brought Jonson and Chapman a degree of notoriety—resulting in the temporary incarceration of its caustic coauthors, not so much for expressing overtly anti-Scot senti-ments as for making a number of sarcastic references to James I—it per-haps put Thorpe’s business on a temporarily sounder footing. It also cemented his relationship with Aspley, who again acquired joint copy-right in the provocative play (though, according to its title page, it was published by Thorpe alone—as per the Sonnets).

By the end of 1608, when Thorpe probably acquired the precious manuscript of sonnets, he had reached the high tide of his fortunes. That year he had managed to publish three books for the first time, and had even occupied a shop, The Tiger’s Head, in St. Paul’s Churchyard. Those three books included George Chapman’s Byronand Ben Jon-son’s Masques of Blackness and Beauty,the third of Chapman’s and the fourth of Jonson’s works that Thorpe had put into the world.

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the precious “scribal copy,” or was he merely concerned that the sonnet fad was largely spent? Or did he recognize a potentially scurrilous sub-text underlying the majority of these lovelorn sonnets?

Whatever his concerns, it seems clear Thorpe was staking much of his meager finances and reputation on a single roll of the dice—and the publishing value of this singular poet’s name. But he still couldn’t do it by himself. Or didn’t want to. When it came to the sonnets, he was still reliant on a printer-friend and two booksellers, one of whom was Asp-ley, to make it happen.

Even in 1609, Thorpe would have needed Aspley more than Aspley needed Thorpe. Having entered into his part-time partnership with Thorpe five years earlier, when he was just another struggling stationer, Aspley was now an altogether more prestigious name than either the sonnets’ printer or their publisher. Indeed, he would later become Mas-ter of the Stationers’ Company, the most esteemed position in Jaco-bethan publishing, as well as being a member of the syndicate responsible for the 1623 First Folio, and eventually acquiring the rights to publish Venus & Adonis.

All of which could well suggest that his appreciation of Shakespeare’s work transcended mere commercial interest. And the fact that Aspley was given his own “edition” of the Sonnets,credited as seller of the book on the title page, implies that he provided upfront capital, while Thorpe again fulfilled his familiar role as “procurer of manuscripts.” (Of the two title pages Thorpe printed, Aspley’s is significantly rarer—just four copies of “his” edition have survived.)

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“bore the same imprint as his impression of Shakespeare’s sonnets” [SL-F]. The copyright, though, remained with Thorpe, suggesting he consid-ered it a commodity worth hanging on to, even when allying himself with others who shared a history of disregard for the rules of the Stationers’ and an interest, commercial and/or literary, in the works of William. Of these comrades, Eld would prove the most “loyal.”

George Eld had already published his own contribution to that ever-expanding canon of Shakespearean Apocrypha—a 1607 edition of The Puritan, a.k.a.The Widow of Watling Street,initially credited to “W.S.,” but now considered to be the work of Thomas Middleton. Eld enjoyed a similarly checkered career as a publisher-printer, being fined by the company in 1606 and 1610 for printing ballads without license, a com-mon enough practice. In fact, something like a third of the books pub-lished were never entered at all—for reasons hard to comprehend, given that the four or six pence it cost to register a broadside or a book con-ferred the company’s protection and copyright (though, according to J. W. Bennett, “the custom of the trade” meant “copyright was assumed and enjoyed by many who did not trouble to enter their copies”).

That Eld was fined twice suggests he was producing, at least for a short time, such broadsheets on a brazen scale. Most such piracy was carried out by the company’s members—just as in the present day most audio piracy is conducted by members of the “official” phonographic in-dustry (and is equally tacitly condoned). And Eld, like Thorpe, was fully prepared to violate another printer’s copyright, for which he was fined by the company in 1619, by which time he was no longer an associate of Aspley, who had gone on to greater things, or Thorpe, whose days as a publisher were nearing an end.

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doing his utmost in 1606–8 “to break out on his own as a publisher.” Having previously published just two books of his own, in these three years “he entered a large number of works in the Stationers’ Register, printed fine editions of histories in translation, and acquired the copy-right” on some four plays, all of which he published himself.

With partners like these, Thorpe must have acquired the manuscript for the sonnets independent of Eld and/or Aspley. Otherwise, I doubt they would have had any reason to make him a part of the venture. Un-like Thorpe, Eld had his own printing presses, and Aspley had vital means of distribution. Thorpe probably felt the Sonnetsprovided a God-sent opportunity to demonstrate his literary taste, and contacts, and show his fellow stationers that he had what it took. And so it was proba-bly with some bravado, and not a little trepidation, that he penned the most famous dedication in literary history, sometime early in 1609:

TO. THE .ONLIE . BEGETTER . OF. THESE . INSVING . SONNETS. MR. W.H. ALL .HAPPINESSE. AND .THAT. ETERNITIE. PROMISED.

BY.

OVR. EVERLIVING. POET. WISHETH.

THE . WELLWISHING. ADVENTVRER . IN . SETTING.

FORTH .

—T.T.

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copyright and controlled the publication,” while “the exceptionally brusque and commercial description of the poems” provided further “evidence that the author was no party to the transaction.” Poet George Wither articulated the general practice in a 1595 volume of his own, “It is a usuall manner . . . for all those that goe about to publish any work or writing of theirs, to dedicate it to some one or other.”

Thorpe had not, however, presumed to provide one of his own inim-itable dedications to any of the volumes he published for Jonson or Chapman. Indeed, Shake-speares Sonnetsseem to have provided a first opportunity to exercise his own penmanship since that garrulous dedica-tion to Blount, back in 1600. And though he pruned the length to which he went this time to sing the “inspirer” or procurer’s praise, he managed in the space of thirty words to create quite enough conundrums for the centuries. The meaning of “onlie begetter”; the identity of “Mr W.H.”; the import of “well-wishing adventurer”; the kind of “eternitie” which he here promises, are issues that have taxed some of history’s finer minds, all of whom have ultimately admitted defeat. Thorpe’s dedication has be-come the literary equivalent of the Sphinx’s riddle.

The most contentious, and least resolvable, of the many disputes oc-casioned by these few words undoubtedly revolves around the meaning of the expression Thorpe coined at its outset, “To The Onlie Begetter.” Professor Hyder Rollins displays not the slightest propensity for exag-geration when claiming, in his indispensable variorum edition of the Sonnets,“An entire library has been written on [just] the[se] four open-ing words.”

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Most anyone arguing that he meant merely “procurer” has tended to avoid highlighting one contemporary use certainly known to both poet and publisher. Samuel Daniel, dedicating his 1592 Deliasequence to the Countess of Pembroke, described his own sonnets as “begotten by thy hand and my desire.” Such folk have generally taken their lead from James Boswell, who, in his 1821 “Malone” edition of The Plays & Poems, “wished to relieve the poet from the imputation of having written the sonnets to any particular person, or as anything but a play of fancy.” But, as Edwardian scholar H.C. Beeching was obliged to point out, “[Even] allowing it to be conceivable that a piratical publisher should inscribe a book of sonnets to the thief who brought him the manuscript, why should he lay stress on the fact that ‘alone he did it’?”

In fact, anyone attempting to explicate the reasoning underlying Thorpe’s dedication is obliged to take account of the fact that the pub-lisher rarely expressed what he meant, and rarer still, managed to do so with the requisite lucidity or economy of phrasing. As R.G. White ob-served, a century and a half ago, “This dedication is not written in the common phraseology of its period; it is throughout a piece of affectation and elaborate quaintness.”

The sheer convolutedness of the dedication should at least remove any possibility that it was really Shakespeare’s own, published, as it were, by proxy. And yet, Katherine Duncan-Jones, in her 1997 Arden edition of the sonnets, refused to let Thorpe stand as the only begetter of his tortuous dedication, suggesting instead that, “though the initials of ‘T.T.’ are at the bottom, and the over-rhetorical wording is evidently Thorpe’s, the dedication, like the text itself, had Shakespeare’s author-ity.” The basis for her novel suggestion is a house of cards theory that presupposes Shakespeare not only wanted to see his poems published, but gave them to Thorpe for that purpose.

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made as far back as 1897. This generally attractive theory, first espoused by William Archer in an article in The Fortnightly Review,in which he pre-sented “The Case against Southampton” as the Fair Youth of the son-nets, suggested that the words “To Mr W.H.” had been “prefixed to sonnet one” all along:

The overwhelming probability is that Thorpe did not know the se-cret history of the Sonnets, and, reading them either carelessly or not at all, supposed them all addressed to the dedicatee whose ini-tials no doubt figured at the head of the Ms. . . . There is no diffi-culty in supposing that Thorpe did not quite know the history of the poems he was publishing; whereas it is very difficult to conceive his using so common a word [as ‘begetter’] in so quaint, affected and archaic a sense [as ‘procurer’].

Archer’s theory resolves so many of the issues which have plagued sonnet-detectives that it is slightly surprising it has gone largely un-adopted—even though Beeching refined it further in his 1904 edition, suggesting that Thorpe may have “found his manuscript of the Sonnets headed ‘To W.H.’ and, being ignorant who W.H. was, supplied the ordi-nary title of respect.” (Beeching was seeking to explain away how a no-ble, as he supposed, came to be addressed as a mere gentleman.)

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Study of Facts and Problems(1930), in a supplementary essay on “‘The Youth’ of the Sonnets.” Dover-Wilson, meanwhile, drawing on Cham-bers, modified the view to fit his own supposition “that Thorpe pro-cured his collection from a person or persons he had discovered possessed them and that he found ‘To W.H.’ at the head of the portfo-lio or chief manuscript.”

However, like Chambers and Archer before him, Dover-Wilson found his suggestion fell on stony ground when it came to fellow aca-demics. He was arguing against a rising tide of opinion—in academia, at least—that preferred an ordered, authorized Q text. In suggesting that Thorpe, as the “procurer of the manuscript,” had no clue as to the iden-tity of W.H., he was a man out of time.

Yet a private inscription would in an instance remove the demands of social propriety which convinced so many Victorians that “Mr W.H.” could never be a man of title. For anyone like the 1855 correspondent to Fraser’s Magazinewho insisted that “if ‘Mr W.H.’ had been a man of rank and importance . . . ‘T.T.’ would have given his name in full, with all [his] titles and additions,” the possibility that the initialed dedication was a private one—perhaps written when the Fair Youth (i.e., Master W.H.) was still not in his majority—had not even been entertained.

Thorpe’s failure to attach any significance to these initials would cer-tainly help “explain” his adoption of such a clumsy expression as “onlie begetter.” He was surely making a very bad, if archetypally Elizabethan, pun on “only begotten,” a familiar phrase even then, and one with a very specific sense that directly relates to the subject of the first seventeen sonnets—an heir. Indeed, it could have been these sonnets—and these alone—that were dedicated “in ms.” to “Mr W.H.”

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After all, such dedications on manuscript copies were hardly unknown in the Elizabethan era. A manuscript copy of Robert Southwell’s Four-fold Meditation,published by another “W.H.” in 1606, contains an “epis-tel dedicatorie” by Peter Mowle on the first page that, according to Lee, expressed “the conventional greeting of happiness here and hereafter”; while so-called presentation copies of Jonson’s and Chapman’s as-sorted works invariably contained their fair share of self-conscious in-scriptions.

If Thorpe was faced with a similar “epistel dedicatorie,” and had no way of checking with the author without alerting him to the publisher’s acquisition of said poems, then Duncan-Jones is entitled to suggest that “the over-rhetorical wording is . . . Thorpe’s, [whereas] the dedication, like the text itself, had Shakespeare’s authority.” However, such a dedi-cation would date from the time the manuscript copy was made, not when it was acquired by Thorpe—i.e., at the turn of the century, and not 1608–9, when “T.T.” overelaborated what little he had to go on.

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23

1590–1603

“THE SWEETE WITTIE

SOULE OF OVID”

If [the sonnets] descend to what they descend, they [also] ascend to what they ascend, and who knows quite what the body of them is; as, for instance, if these or those are not [just] exercises on a rainy after-noon in a country-house?

—J. A. CHAPMAN, Essays,1943

I

t is not just the cryptic dedication to that precious first edition of Shake-speares Sonnetswhich provides compelling evidence for its unauthorized, nay piratical, status. We also have to consider the existence of some, if not all, of its contents in manuscript form in Lon-don literary circles more than a decade earlier, at the height of what might be termed the Elizabethan sonnet fad.

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Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury (1598). Aside from naming (and there-fore helping to date) twelve of the plays, Meres refers to how “the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus & Adonis, his Lucrece, [and] his sugred Sonnets among his private friends, &c.”

How literally Meres intended to convey the idea that Shakespeare was an English reincarnation of Ovid, this solitary sentence fails to re-veal. There is certainly no shortage of Ovidian sentiment, or reasoning, in these poems, but it was a large part of Meres’s general thesis that his English contemporaries had as much to offer as classical authors.

Nor is Meres done with making comparisons. In a later paragraph from the same section of his treasury, comparing (near) contemporary English poets with those from a more exotic past, he elected to place Shakespeare in exalted company—alongside the Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Raleigh, and fellow son-neteer Samuel Daniel—as one of those “most passionate among us to bewail and bemoan the perplexities of Love.” Such a tantalizing descrip-tion sounds particularly apposite if Meres had in mind the so-called Dark Lady sonnets (Q127–52), which appear to portray a love triangle riddled with guilt, lust, and betrayal—the “perplexities of Love” writ large.

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book, in order to engender interest from a publisher or demand from lovers of Venusand Lucrecefor their eventual publication in a form as ex-act and as popular as those more formal poems.

(It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone in the past four centuries that Thorpe might have approached Meres directly, at a later date, to see if he had retained a copy of the very sonnets he describes, and would be willing to part with them for a consideration. Thorpe already had a reputation as a “procurer of manuscripts” by the time he acquired the Sonnets.If he actively acquired, as opposed to merely chanced upon, these prized specimens of the sonnet-form, Meres would have been a logical starting-point, provided his whereabouts were known. As a liter-ary man, he could have been known to a number of London booksellers even from his remote Rutland rectorship. And as we know, Thorpe was both a collector and a publisher with strong literary interests, albeit un-aligned to any real business acumen.)

But, again, mere speculation. Suffice to say, Francis Meres’s mention must have excited some interest in a set of unpublished poems from the author of two highly successful epic poems published earlier in the de-cade. Indeed, at least one London publisher who now went in search of Shakespearean sonnets came up trumps in a matter of months, publish-ing a collection that purported to contain some twenty of Shakespeare’s lyrics—of which nine are in conventional sonnet-form—the following year.

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Once again, we are back in the murky world of Elizabethan book-publishing, in which any member of the Stationers’ Company could publish without “permission” the literary output of any writer careless with his “foul papers”; and even, if he saw fit, to attribute the work of one writer to another, without any real recompense or recourse available to the writers involved. A publisher called Richard Jones, hoping to cash in on the ongoing popularity of Tottel’s Miscellany,had presented another poetical miscellany as a single-author collection, Britton’s Bowre of De-lights,back in 1592, and though the wronged Nicholas Breton com-plained loud and long in The Pilgrimage to Paradise,the following year, he failed to have the book recalled.

So Shakespeare had hardly been singled out when someone like William Jaggard attributed The Passionate Pilgrimto him without estab-lishing whether he, as a “name” author, was actually responsible for the majority—let alone the entirety—of its contents. Of the twenty poems contained therein, just five can be attributed to Shakespeare with any degree of certainty; and of those, three were “manufactured” sonnets, transposed from their true context, in Love’s Labours Lost.Yet Shake-speare decided not to go down the Breton route—at least, not for a while. Perhaps he was relieved to find Jaggard had accessed so few “sug-red sonnets.” Or took the forward-thinking view that there was no such thing as bad publicity.

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Two loves I have, of Comfort and Despaire, That like two Spirits, do suggest me still: My better Angell, is a Man (right faire) My worser spirit a Woman (colour’d ill). To win me soone to hell, my Female evill Tempteth my better Angell from my side: And would corrupt my Saint to be a Divell, Wooing his puritie with her faire pride. And whether that my Angell be turnde feend, Suspect I may (yet not directly tell:) For being both to me: both, to each friend, I guess one Angell in anothers hell: The truth I shall not know, but live in dout, Till my bad Angell fire my good one out.

The implication, adopted wholesale by advocates of at least one earl— though not one borne out by any credible chronology of composition— is that both sequences were fully realized by the time Jaggard found his hoard. Certainly, as of 1599, elements of at least one Shakespearean sonnet-sequence were in a form that suggests they had been reworked, before or after being passed “among . . . private friends.” The other Q sonnet, as published by Jaggard, runs as follows:

When my Love sweares that she is made of truth, I do beleeve her (though I know she lies) That she might thinke me some untuter’d youth, Unskilful in the worlds false forgeries.

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But wherefore sayes my love that she is young? And wherefore say not I, that I am old: O, Loves best habit’s in a soothing toung, And Age in love, loves not to have yeares told. Therefore I’le lye with Love, and love with me, Since that our faultes in love thus smother’d be.

(The versions in The Passionate Pilgrimof Q138 and 144 are marginally clearer than those preferred by Thorpe, though Paul Kerrigan and Katherine Duncan-Jones, in their 1986 and 1997 editions, respectively, seem convinced that they come from memorized transcripts. In the case of 144, two typos in Q—“sight” for “side” [144.6] and “finde” for “fiend” [144.9]—are given correctly in P.P.,which makes it unlikely that the differences are solely down to being “transmitted through memorization.”)

Yet one should be wary of leaping to the conclusion that “the Q se-quence” was complete by the date Jaggard acquired his poetic prize, just because these numerically late sonnets were circulating in the 1590s. For the idea that the 154 sonnets constitute one sustained sonnet-sequence is essentially an invention of posterity, beholden to the order in which Thorpe published them, which may or may not represent the order in which Shakespeare conceived of them.

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138 and 144 were circulating separately from any other sonnets yet composed. Cumulatively, the testimony of the extant [seventeenth-century] manuscripts and The Passionate Pilgrimstrongly encourages the conclusion that the sonnets circulated in manuscript individually, not as a sequence.”

Taylor overstates his case. He was subsequently challenged by Arthur Marotti, who, “while agreeing with [his] contention that the sonnets cir-culated in manuscript in a form other than that of the whole collection found in the 1609 Quarto, [thought] it unlikely that single poems were passed about, given . . . the ways that paper was used in this period. . . . [Rather] the uncollected sonnets were either circulated in small sets or groups of poems, passed about in commonplace-book collections, or transmitted through memorization.” Marotti has a point, especially as the price of a quire (approximately two dozen sheets) of writing paper at the beginning of the seventeenth century was between 4d. and 5d., with ruled paper double that price, such paper invariably being acquired in quires, not in single leaves.

Taylor himself was aiming to demonstrate that a particular sonnet from the “first” sequence (Q2) circulated “individually, not as [part of] a sequence.” Not surprisingly, he preferred to overlook the possibility that Jaggard may have acquired other sonnets from the same sequence, but chose not to publish them because they were unduly concerned with the perversities of love. After all, his compendium wholly comprises light, breezy dispositions on the “perplexities” of heterosexual love.

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And it would seem that at least one of the so-called “marriage” son-nets quickly passed into discreet circulation, as Taylor has ably demon-strated, using thirteen surviving manuscript copies of Q2 (“When fortie Winters shall beseige thy brow”) dating from the first half of the seven-teenth century. Making a textual comparison of all thirteen manuscripts, he showed that eleven of these versions almost certainly derived from a single copy, which was significantly different from the version Thorpe published. And, in Taylor’s opinion, this manuscript version was itself a pre-Q source:

SPES ALTERA

When forty winters shall beseige thy brow And trench deepe furrowes in yt lovely feild Thy youthes faire Liu’rie so accounted now Shall bee like rotten weeds of no worth held Then beeing askt where all thy bewty lyes Where all ye lustre of thy youthfull dayes To say within these hollow suncken eyes Were an all-eaten truth, & worthless prayse O how much better were thy bewtyes vse If thou coudst say this pretty child of mine Saues my account & makes my old excuse Making this bewty by succession thin This were to bee new borne when thou art old And see thy bloud warme when thou feelst it cold.

Q2

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Wil be a totter’d weed of smal worth held: Then being askt, where all thy beautie lies, Where all the treasure of thy lusty daies; To say within thine owne deepe sunken eyes, Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise. How much more praise deseru’d thy beauties vse, If thou couldst answere this faire child of mine Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse Proouing his beautie by succession thine. This were to be new made when thou art ould, And see thy blood warme when thou feel’st it could.

Taylor’s extrapolated version from eleven manuscripts appears to con-firm that even a sonnet from the marriage sequence (1–17), the only part of Q that is self-evidently an integrated unit, probably circulated inde-pendently. And it had a title, as well. “Spes Altera”—a reference to the line in Virgil’s Aeneidin which Ascanius is called magnae spes altera Ro-mae(“second hope of great Rome”)—appears in four codependent manuscripts, and, as Taylor observes, “A copyist is most unlikely to in-vent a title like ‘Spes Altera,’ which . . . to my knowledge is not used else-where as an epigraph or motto or title in this period.” But it was precisely the kind of reference a young literary figure still making his way in the cutthroat world of London, and with a slight inferiority complex, might introduce to demonstrate that his grammar-school education had not been entirely wasted, and that he knew more than “a little Latin.”

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similar private dissemination but struck far less of a chord with contem-porary compilers of manuscript miscellanies.

The “procreation” theme explored in Q2 (and Q8) was one familiar to Elizabethans, and evidently a popular one. Thomas Wilson’s familiar textbook, The Arte of Rhetorique,revised in 1560, translated an epistle from Erasmus “to perswade a young gentleman to Mariage,” providing a direct source for the second sonnet that the literary-minded would have readily recognized: “What man can be greeved that he is old, when he seeth his owne countenance . . . to appeare lively in his sonne? You shall have a pretie little boie, running up and doune your house, soche a one as shall express your loke, and your wives look . . . by whom you shall seme to bee newe borne.”

Such a theme would have been especially poignant to a poet still griev-ing for his dead son, as Shakespeare would have been if—as I am about to suggest—the sonnet dates from shortly after Hannet Shakespeare, just eleven years old, was buried in August 1596. Yet the fact that these son-nets did not appear in Passionate Pilgrimsuggests that they did not fea-ture in any miscellany or commonplace book that entered Jaggard’s clutches, which rather suggests they circulated independent of Q138 and 144 (and/or that any scribal replication occurred after Jaggard had com-mitted himself to publishing the poems he had chanced upon).

Perhaps they were among a set of poems earmarked for a collection cryptically registered for publication in January 1600, as “A booke called Amoursby J.D. with certain other sonnetes by W.S.” Katherine Duncan-Jones argues, in her Arden edition, that “J.D.” was probably Sir John Davies. In which case, the sonneteer “W.S.” is just as likely to have been Shakespeare as Sidney Lee’s preferred candidate, William Smith (of-fered by Lee even though he considered one of Davies’ “gulling sonnets” a parody of Shakespeare’s legal phraseology in Q26).

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Shakespearean sonnets waiting to be harvested. Coming from someone in whom “the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives,” these could have com-plemented some of Davies’ own satirical sonnets, or even a new transla-tion of Ovid’s Amores. Duncan-Jones overstretches, though, when she goes on to suggest that Shakespeare might have “prepared some sonnets for publication early in 1600 motivated by a desire to put right Jaggard’s damaging misappropriation and misidentification of his work.” There is absolutely no evidence that Jaggard’s book “damaged” Shakespeare’s reputation (the fact there were two editions close together tends to sug-gest the reverse).

It seems more likely that these “certain other sonnetes”—if they were Shakespeare’s, and not some other W.S.’s—were among those that ulti-mately appeared in Q. As to why they were not published “authorita-tively” at this time, the reason cannot have been a purely commercial one. A collection of sonnets from the author of Venus & Adonisand Lu-crecewould, on the face of it, have been a valuable commodity; a fact Jag-gard fully recognized when he republished The Passionate Pilgrimwith a new subtitle, Or, Certaine Amorous Sonnets, betweene Venus and Adonis.

Yet, Shakespeare continued to leave the sonnets in manuscript—both those “sugred Sonnets [found] among his private friends” and others, perhaps including these “certain other sonnetes.” Not that there was any-thing peculiar, or even original, about such a decision. Sir Philip Sidney’s 108-sonnet sequence, Astrophil & Stella,had been circulated among friends since some time before his death in 1586, but it was not until “a publishing adventurer,” Thomas Newman, published the sequence, along with “sundry other rare sonnets by divers noblemen and gentle-men,” in 1591, that the form enveloped the Elizabethan literati and would not let go till every able-bodied poet(aster) had demonstrated dexterity with what the French preferred to call a quatorzain.

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(Q18–126) at this stage in his career would have opened him to possi-ble charges of pederasty—still an offence technically punishapossi-ble by death, as per Leviticus, and a charge Marlowe narrowly avoided by get-ting himself killed. Likewise, the numerous references to a noble patron that litter these letters-versified would surely have required a visit by Shakespeare to the Privy Council, at the very least, to explain himself. There was a specific offence—scandalum magnatum—when it came to the libeling of peers.

That the censors of books took their duties seriously is evidenced by the events of June 1, 1599, when the Bishop of London notified the mas-ters and wardens “that all books by [Thomas] Nashe . . . be taken and never printed hereafter” for “containing matter unfit to be published.” And if the J.D. of the 1600 Amourswas Sir John Davies, then he now knew just how draconian and arbitrary the church’s powers could be. As did the “W.S.” who featured in a long poem called Willobie His Avisa, registered in September 1594, and involving a virtuous lady, Avisa; the tortured lover, H.W.; and his “familiar friend W.S.” Both Davies’ Epi-grammes and Elegiesand the anonymous Willobie His Avisawere among the “scurrilous and libellous works” ordered to be burned by the bishop, along with “all books by Nashe.”

Presumed by many to be an allegorical version of some minor literary scandal—and subsequently seized on by optimistic Southamptonites as a depiction of the Dark Lady’s duplicitous affairs with a playwright and Fair Youth—the belated condemnation of Willobie His Avisadoes rather suggest there was “some element of scandal in the poem” [EKC]. Yet no contemporary ever connected the two W.S.’s, even though the poem continued to enjoy a healthy reputation and print-life throughout the first half of the seventeenth century—unlike the Sonnets.

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around 1594 and, like Shakespeare, chose to circulate them in manu-script only (in Davies’ case, it would be 1873 before they made it to the printing press!). The satirical vein struck by Davies and—on occa-sion—Shakespeare in their respective sonnets could suggest a joint plan to rain scorn down on their more sentimental fellow sonneteers.

Given the general literary context in which such sequences might have been composed, and the elusive personal circumstances of the Stratford poet, one productive path has been opened up by recognizing a satirical streak running through parts of Q. The object of such satire seems to be the sonnet-craze itself, suggesting said sonnets were writ-ten either just before or shortly after the fad burnt itself out. To satirize a discredited form would be a pretty redundant exercise; and to satirize a form that had as yet a handful of proponents and very little press—as was the case before publication of Sidney’s Astrophil & Stellaand Daniel’s Delia,in 1591 and 1592, respectively—equally pointless.

But surely if Shakespeare was tempted to find mirth at the sonnet-form’s expense, would it not be reflected in the plays of the period? It is. In Love’s Labours Lost—which probably premiered circa 1595–96, and ap-pears in a “bad” quarto edition in 1598—the characters fall in love at the drop of a hat, and when they do, they write sonnets. Even the title seems to be a play on something one of Shakespeare’s near-contemporaries, John Florio, wrote in First Fruits(1578): “We need not speak so much of love, all books are full of love; with so many authors, that it were labour lost to speak of love.”

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CXXX (Shakespeare) My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grown on her head. I have seen roses damasked, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks, And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound. I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress when she walks treads on the ground . . .

widens to include all sorts of ridiculous fashions in language study and usage.”

Love’s Labours Lost contains four “sonnets” of its own, three of which subsequently appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim,albeit with enough verbal differences to suggest that Jaggard “printed stray copies which were circulating ‘privately,’ and did not find the lines in the printed quartos of the play” [SL]. In the context of the play, these sonnets are clearly satirical—less so in Jaggardian isolation. But the possibility, voiced by Lee, that they circulated independently, alongside other son-nets from Q, suggests a willingness on the author’s part to lampoon his own conceit(s) to a more rarefied audience than the one which fre-quented the theaters.

After all, few contemporaries would have failed to notice the resem-blance between the opening of the so-called fourth Dark Lady sonnet, Q130, and expressions like “thine eye’s bright sun,” a Petrarchian image Samuel Daniel used in Delia;or “Her sparkling eies in heav’n a place de-serve,” from the seventh “Passion” of Thomas Watson’s Passionate Cen-turie of Love.Such a subtext a side-by-side comparison with Watson’s own sonnet amply demonstrates (the original line numbers appear in brackets for the Watson poem; see note for full text):2

VII (Watson) Her sparkling eies in heav’n a place deserve; [3] Her lips more red than any Corall stone; [11] Her necke more white, than any swans yat mone; Her brest transparent is, like any chrystall rocke; [12–13] Her yellow lockes exceede the beaten goulde; [2] On either cheeke a Rose and Lillie lies;[9]

Her breath is sweete perfume, or hollie flame; [10]

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And yet, as Paul Kerrigan suggests in the 1986 Penguin edition of Q, “Some of the metaphors satirized in Sonnet 130 were used of the young man in earlier [sic] poems” in Q—the populist poet again dem onstrat-ing a rare capacity for mockonstrat-ing his own folly. Or, to fleetonstrat-ingly impose the auteur on lines delivered by one particular character in Love’s Labours Lost,“By heaven, I do love, and it hath taught me to rhyme / And to be melancholy.” Some have, not unreasonably, adduced that the Dark Lady’s spirit infuses the entire play, citing Biron’s verbal portrait of Rosalind:

O, if in black my lady’s brows be decked, It mourns that painting and usurping hair Should ravish doters with a false aspect, And therefore is she born to make black fair.

(It would be equally hard to overlook the parallel between “from thine eyes my knowledge I derive” (Q14.9) and a line in Act IV, Scene 3, of Love’s Labours Lost:“From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive.”)

Shakespeare, bound as he was by popular tastes, artistically and finan-cially, found himself obliged to reconcile opposite impulses—playing to them, while simultaneously sending them up. He certainly never modi-fied his mordant view on popular expressions of lovelorn melancholia. Hence, Ophelia’s snatches of song signifying her slide toward suicide, or, more whimsically, the scene in The Winter’s Talewhere Autolycus offers to sing “another ballad, of a fish that appeared . . . forty thousand fathoms above water, and sung this ballad against the hard hearts of maids. . . . The ballad is very pitiful, and as true.”

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value, in plays and/or to amuse friends, there is no way he wrote all154 sonnets in Q with such a lightweight purpose. The geneses of this partic-ular play and these poems may be contemporaneous, but the poems do not operate as a single narrative; while any satirical intent in Q strikes me as essentially confined to the Dark Lady material.

Even if the positioning of the first 126 sonnets, the so-called “Fair Youth” sequence, reflects some kind of authorial intent—i.e., they ap-peared in (much) this order in the manuscript, and Thorpe decided not to second-guess his material—how they relate to the Dark Lady sonnets is not clear. A possible link with one of the plays, though, might provide a chronological end-bracket to these other poems. Q126—widely re-garded as the “envoi” to the Fair Youth poems—uses the word “Qui-etus,” meaning final settlement, an expression appearing just once in a Shakespeare play: “When he himself might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin?” (Hamlet,Act III, Scene 1, line 77). The final couplet of 126 reads: “Her [i.e., Time’s] audit, though delayed, answered must be / And her quietus is to render thee.” It is such a startling word to utilize at the end of a sonnet that one is tempted to view these usages as sharing a common conception. But even accepting such a premise would not provide us with a precise chronology—the play could have been com-posed at any point between 1599 and its July 1602 registration.

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re-ceived ‘little or no revision’; [whereas] sonnets 104–26 were probably composed around 1600.” They also assigned sonnets 127–54 to “the first half of the 1590s” . . . but judged that they “were probably not revised.”

However, the trio’s choice of “early plays” from which they drew sam-ple ERW words was almost immediately questioned, while the slightly arbitrary divisions in the Fair Youth sequence (at 60 and 103) rendered their conclusions regarding the sequence as a whole hard to embrace. At least their conclusions about the Dark Lady sonnets made some kind of sense within the context of Q.

A perceived lack of revision among the so-called Dark Lady sonnets (127–54) seems mirrored by a similar lack of any discernible pattern of organization. J.W. Mackail found a marked contrast with what comes ear-lier in Q, such that, “while in [his] opinion Sonnets 1 to 126 are a continu-ous, ordered and authentic collection, 127–54 are a miscellaneous and disordered appendix.” Arthur Marotti goes further, supposing that, “if some of the 154 sonnets of the 1609 Quarto circulated in manuscript in the 1590s . . . they were more likely to have been those from the ‘dark lady’ section of the collection . . . as [these] verse [are] lacking the social exclu-siveness of the more private encomiastic sonnets to the young man.”

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The notion that the bulk of the Fair Youth sonnets were revised shortly “after the turn of the century” (contemporaneous with a series of freshly composed sonnets?) accords with an authorial intention repeat-edly expressed in the sonnets themselves—specifically Q18, 19, 55, 60, 63, 74, 81, 101, 107—to ensure that these poems were passed on to pos-terity. Of the half a dozen sonnets devoted wholly to this theme, per-haps the most revealing in terms of authorial intent is Q55, in which Shakespeare tells the reader he is reserving all the fame attendant to “this powerful rhyme” to the “Fair Youth” who has “cast the glamour over him,” leaving none for himself:

Not marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme; But you shall shine more bright in these contents Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.

Here Shakespeare has composed an entire sonnet emulating the Ovid of Metamorphoses.Specifically, he is alluding to the fifteenth book’s epi-logue, where the Roman, at the end of his arduous endeavors, finally bangs his own drum. Ovid is convinced that his own name shall live on as a result of his own powerful, not to say protracted, rhyme. And live on it did, albeit to Elizabethans in the 1567 Arthur Golding translation to which Shakespeare generally referred:

Let comme that fatall howre

Which (saving of this brittle flesh) hath over mee no powre, And at his pleasure make an end of myne uncerteyne tyme. Yit shall the better part of mee assured bee too clyme Aloft above the starry skye. And all the world shall never Be able to quench my name . . .

(54)

Shakespeare conceives of a different kind of immortality, a self-effacing kind that memorializes the subject of his verses, not their creator. In Q81, he actually states that the verses will endure as long as Ovid’s, “such vertue hath my Pen”—though not the name of the writer respon-sible: “I (once gone) to all the world must dye / . . . [But] your monu-ment shall be my gentle verse.” Meanwhile, in Sonnet 18, it is his “love” that “shall in my verse ever live young”; in Q60, this “verse” that “shall stand / Praising thy worth”; “His beautie,” in Q63, that “shall in these blacke lines be seene”; and, most Ovidian of all, “thou in this shalt finde thy monument” (Q107).

All of these internal boasts, a repeating feature of the Fair Youth se-quence, contain that extraordinary combination of poetic bravado and self-effacement which could come only from a man who wrote plays for the ages, and then left not a single play behind in what might be termed an “authorial text.” Not that his attitude would have seemed so strange to a Jacobethan, for whom “the very concept of individual authorship in the Renaissance was a relative one . . . a large part of education [being] devoted to the practise of imitation, both of manner and of matter” [HRW].

What the poet is alluding to in the “immortality” sonnets, and per-haps envisaging by his actions, is a sequence that would, in the fullness of time, replicate the fate of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil & Stella, pub-lished posthumously when the personalities were “food for worms”; for, not only did Sidney’s muse, Penelope Rich, a courtier’s wife, duly end up immortalized in verse, but the knight’s work served as a model for Shakespeare’s own sequence in so many ways, not least structurally.

(55)

late friend did “not hav[e] the fate, common with some, to be exequutor to his owne writings.” Are the pair making a subtle dig at those—like Thorpe and Jaggard (the printer of the folio)—who had taken it upon themselves to act as executors before the man had even passed on?

In the case of the sonnets, the internal references imply only that Shakespeare envisaged circulating the poems anonymously—hence, perhaps, “certain other sonnetes by W.S.” This was not an uncommon conceit in a period when notions of authorship were held to be of far less importance than in our post-Romantic world. George Puttenham’s trea-tise, The Arte of English Poesie(1589), was one important work that came into the printer Richard Field’s hands, “with his bare title without any Authours name or any other ordinarie addresse.” The work was all.

Of course, in order to even release these poems anonymously, Shake-speare would still have had to entrust his original to a copyist. It seems unlikely he would have done this if all he wanted to do was forward it to its “onlie begetter.” But it could have been transcribed for the purpose of presentation. H. R. Woudhuysen describes how such “presentation manuscripts can [generally] be identified by prefaces and dedica-tions . . . [and also] by the care and elaboration of their writing and dec-oration. . . . Examples of presentation inscriptions, in prose or verse, are common—Chapman, Daniel and Jonson made much use of them.” It seems highly unlikely that such a presentation copy would have made its way to Thorpe during the author’s lifetime, so other copies must have been made, either knowingly or surreptitiously.

(56)

manuscript. As I have indicated earlier, there were a number of reasons why he would have considered this course preferable to publication.

What Shakespeare is unlikely to have foreseen was the publication of his carefully structured sonnet-sequence bound up with discarded exer-cises he had previously passed around, perhaps concerning an earlier af-fair, as well as a handful of satirical sonnets, and even a couple of questionable rhetorical exercises concerning Cupid, based on an Ovid-ian text (Q153–54). Nor that a long, tedious narrative poem—by an en-tirely different poet—would be attributed by Thorpe to him whose pen “hath . . . such vertue.”

(57)

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